Toward Technology-Sensitive Catching-Up Policies: Insights from Renewable Energy in China

The voluminous literature on industrial catching-up in Southeast Asian countries has regularly argued that successful catching-up largely depended on a committed state, which orchestrated industry development with a relatively uniform set of policies, including R&D support, subsidies, trade restrictions, and local content requirements. In contrast, recent contributions from the technology lifecycle literature have argued that policies should be tailored to differing technological characteristics in industries for mass-produced standardized goods, complex engineered products, and—as we argue—complex product systems (CoPS). In this paper, we extend this argument by introducing a set of separate policy mixes for each industry type, which appears most capable of providing the key resources required for catching-up: knowledge, market access, financial investment and technology legitimacy. This framework is used to analyze catching-up patterns in China’s wind, solar PV, and biomass power plant industries, drawing mainly on policy documents and 106 interviews with key industry actors.